Full Frontal Fiction (20 page)

“You seem upset,” Pat says, slipping back into her robe.

“I just feel...like I'm running late. I slept late, and then, well, this happened. And now I'm really late. I should go.” Elaine practically runs for the door.

“Something special you want for dinner?” Pat calls after her. “What's your favorite food? Wednesday is grab bag. Everyone puts in their wishes, and each person ends up getting at least one thing they want.”

Nothing, Elaine wants nothing.

“You can't leave without naming something,” Pat says.

“Beets,” Elaine says, racing.

“Oh, that's good, that's great. I never would have thought of that,” Pat says.

Elaine throws the car into gear and pulls away—she hates beets. Why did she say beets? She drives around the block, pulls up in front of the house, and blows the horn. Pat opens the door, thrilled that Elaine has returned. She leans forward, as though expecting Elaine to make some declaration along the lines of “I love you,” or at least “Thanks, that was fun.” Elaine rolls down the window and shouts her confession across the lawn. “I hate beets. I don't know why I said that.”

Pat's face takes a fall.

“Asparagus,” Elaine says. “Asparagus is fine.”

“Oh,” Pat calls back, recovering. “Oh, good. Asparagus is a good thing.”

A Story Problem

BY DARCY COSPER

LET X = X. There are things to solve. There are many variables. There are elements to be accounted for. There are trajectories to identify. There are forces to be reckoned with.

Your answers will count. You must show your work. Pay attention.

You are at a party. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that it is a large party, it is a large city, it is deep summer. Let us say that there are many people and that they are restless in certain ways and dressed with intent and the room is big and less than bright but more than dim.

The party is very large and crowded and the music is loud and heat is close and pressing and the women twist their hair up off their necks and pluck at their shirts and people flap their hands and everyone says to everyone else, It's so hot it's so hot.

There is only one person in this room you have fucked more than once. Let him be represented by the letter
A.
You were with him for years. It was not so long ago. He leans against the wall, you see him in pieces through a mass of people. He is talking to a woman, B, who is a close friend of yours. She is the former lover of C, a close friend of A's. Three of the four of you once shared a bed, a night, made certain exchanges, ignored consequences.

C is on the other side of the room, talking with D, frail and sleepy-eyed, a childhood friend of B's who C tangled with for a month before some resistance brought things to a halt. Standing with them is E, sultry, sulky, once wooed and tumbled by A, the only time you know of that he stepped out on you. She is large and absurdly beautiful and angry tonight and you travel along her gaze to a corner of the room. She is looking at F, who has fucked B, D and, long ago, G, who is talking to him while she waves to you. J brushes past and his hand lingers at your waist and he is with the girl he was cheating on when years ago you let him seduce you and now she is his wife and K, whose marriage is falling apart, comes to drop a kiss on your brow and asks you to dinner the following week, and he is with the woman he would not harm though he wanted to when you tried to seduce him and didn't sleep for weeks imagining the length of his body and the shape of his face, and you are all smiling and dazed and everyone says to everyone else It's so hot isn't it so terribly hot let's have another drink.

Later you will talk to F, lean, dark-eyed, and he will let one finger come to rest on the delicate sharp point of your hip and E will come in her lovely rage to slip between the two of you and she will not cast a glance back to acknowledge the space you occupy nor will you move. Later F will take E home and return to the party and G will tell you that E is another in the string of women F has been with between the sheets, and for a moment you will imagine fucking H, the man who broke E's heart—you will imagine this not out of malice but out of a desire for continuity.

Later still, G will leave with a boy who pressed you against the bathroom sink, and you will wonder how many more people each of you would have to fuck for the sake of perfect symmetry. You will wonder what is to be added to this equation tonight.

Let us say that you are at a party and it is a dense late summer night and the weather will never break, never, and your shoulders are bare and slick, that there is a hand resting on one of them, and the hand belongs to a man and there is a wedding ring on this hand. He is standing beside a woman who is not his wife, a tall woman who gave you a slow, appraising smile that made your breath catch when she arrived. Now it is later, it is late, and this tall woman hands you a glass of wine and slips her arm around you and leans to kiss you, and when your wet mouths part the man who is married lets his hand slip from your shoulder and stares and asks Are you for real? And she tells him No, we're just a projection of your desires and you think that she may be right.

Let us say that everyone has had a certain amount to drink, and that you are watching L, a round-eyed cupid-lipped girl introduced to you by B, a girl who has pursued your friendship with a force that unsettles you. Tonight she is an object propelled and drawn by the heat of others. You watch her careen from one group to another, easing herself into the crevices that separate their bodies. Later tonight, so much later, she will kiss A, and he will walk away from her into the dark and call you from the street. And when he calls, one of the people in this room right now will be in your bed, and together from the tangle of sheets you will listen to the answering machine absorb his confession and his anger and his love. You will wish to be alone, you will regret nothing but the rawness between your legs, the rawness of your mouth, the ferocious roughness of the hands that gripped you tonight. You will stand naked in the dark at the door to your apartment and wave goodbye.

Let the letters not yet assigned stand for variables, individuals, situations you don't know, can't see.

Now solve for these things:

The weights of wine and ice and bourbon.

Melting points and breaking points.

The salt content of sweat, of semen. The surface area of naked skin.

The equal and opposite reactions.

The distance from all centers, the gravitational pull of bodies, the relation of objects.

The velocity of desire.

The probability of grace.

The sum of longing.

The space between us.

Alex

BY ELIZABETH WURTZEL

HE STANDS AT THE ENTRANCE to his apartment as I walk up the stairs. His face is between the door and the post, as if it is stuck in a picture frame. He says hi and pulls the door open to greet me. The knob is missing. He is wearing gray sweatpants and a cut-up Jack Daniel's T-shirt with a red bandanna tied on his head. I remember his publicist telling me he is bald underneath.

I follow him across the room. His apartment is just one room. A long one. The bed is at the other end, underneath the window, which faces south but is too coated in white dirt to let much sunlight in. All over the walls are
Playboy
centerfolds and pictures of motorcycles and of various heavy-metal acts—even a poster of his band. To the side of the bed are a TV and VCR, and the tape in the player says SEX KITTEN. On the other side of the bed are a stereo and some records and tapes, mostly groups I haven't heard of. He falls on the bed as soon as he approaches it, which is understandable since there is no other furniture in the whole place. I'm so tired, he says. I guess that is an explanation. He clings to his pillow and squeezes the covers between his legs like a little baby. I keep wondering if he ever takes the do-rag off.

I sit on the edge of the bed. I am wearing a long, straight, blue cotton skirt, a sleeveless black shirt and black suede boots. I rarely look so conservative. All I can think to do is sit there and say, Great place. I notice a Polaroid of a little white cat on the mantel over the bed. It doesn't look like something Alex might own.

I ask, How is your cat? And he says, Bad question. He's still in the hospital.

I ask, How is your bike? Another bad question, he tells me. It's still in the shop. It needs $700 worth of repairs.

Oh, I say.

Listen, I volunteer, I can see you're tired, so I can just leave. We can do this some other time.

No, he says. His voice is muffled. Please stay. His hand clasps on to the empty side of the bed beside him. He pats it the way I pat my futon when I want the cat to come curl up with me.

Lie down, he commands.

A few days before, we are on the phone making plans. I suggest we have a drink sometime, and he says maybe Monday or Tuesday, and then we are talking about our cats. He tells me that Alby is in the Animal Medical Center because while he was on the road in Asia, the cat ate some telephone wire and got dehydrated. Alby was alone in the apartment, although people came by to feed him, but the cat ate the phone cord in protest. It would cost Alex $600 to get Alby out of the hospital, and he didn't have the money to do it. So he misses the cat.

He's just like me, Alex says of Alby. He gets self-destructive when he's angry.

Yes, I say, it sounds that way.

I feel sorry for Alex. It seems like he really loves the little animal, and I think a person like him should not be deprived of the one thing he might really care about. I feel bad for Alby because he is being deprived of the person who loves him. And then I think, if the cat got into such bad condition living with Alex, maybe he is better off at the hospital.

Don't you find it strange that almost all we've been talking about for the last half hour are our cats? I ask.

No. Alex doesn't think so at all. He says, Compared to most people I know, my cat is really cool.

I lie down on the bed next to him, thinking that there is nothing wrong with having a conversation while prone. There's no other furniture in the apartment, after all. No chairs to sit on civilly. And he is tired. As I get near him, he stinks of whiskey, definitely hard stuff. He told me he's been up for three nights straight partying. His publicist told me that he'd given up on drinking, that all he does now is work out. His arms and chest are muscled and rippled like a person who lifts weights but his face is lined and puffy like a person who doesn't do anything good to his body.

I am facing him. I try to make conversation. I hear you got thrown out of prep school.

Yeah. Lawrenceville. I got pretty well educated before I got expelled.

I ask what he did wrong but he doesn't answer. Did you ever finish school? I ask.

Yeah. In Florida.

Is that where your family lives?

Yeah.

Still?

Yeah.

He rolls me to my side so that I'm not facing him, and pulls me close so that we are layered in fetal position, curled up like two plastic spoons that got bent out of shape by the heat. Maybe he wants to cuddle up when we talk. I'm sorry, he says, pulling me tighter, but this is all I can do right now, I'm so tired.

I am surprised by how nice it feels to be in someone's arms. I examine his bicep, and look at the tattoo from Hawaii. A girl in a bikini and hula skirt says, WISH YOU WERE HERE. There is another one, the Hell's Angels logo: RIDE HARD, DIE FREE. He has tattoos across his knuckles, up his arms, on his chest and back. All I have is a tiny tattoo on my shoulder blade. It says FTW, which stands for
Fuck the World.

The first time I met Alex was at the recording studio. He was being interviewed by a reporter from some metal magazine in the lounge while the producer was mixing tracks and adding some twelve-string guitar lines in the other room. She was asking Alex about his tattoos when I first walked in.

Some people think of it as an art form, but I just like them all over my body, he tells her.

I ask him if it hurt. I bled a little, he says.

I tell him about my tattoo, which a boy I had an affair with at college gave me, using a sewing needle and thread and some indelible black ink that has faded to a greenish-bluish gray by now. It said FTW on the boy's hip, which was pretty much the only thing I liked about him, the only reason I was so eager to pull his pants off night after night so I could look at that mark and feel like he was a skate punk instead of a Harvard student like me. The night he did it I drank a whole bottle of white zinfandel and half a bottle of Wild Turkey so that I wouldn't have to feel the needle prick at my skin.

I say, It didn't hurt at all.

He asks to see it. He is sitting on a couch next to the woman who is interviewing him. I know she really isn't interested in seeing my tattoo. His publicist stands across the room, offering us some fruit: oranges and bananas in a basket. I can tell she is curious about the tattoo. I open a few buttons of the green cropped sweater and pull it over my shoulder. I am glad that I have a nice black bra on. I pull the strap over my arm too.

Alex looks at it.

I tell him I want it fixed since the guy did sort of a sloppy job.

He says, If you give me your phone number, I can call you and tell you the name of a good tattoo artist.

He pulls me close and kisses my ear. He must know he stinks of alcohol because he reaches over my head and grabs something, I can't see what it is, but he sticks it in his mouth and starts chewing. At first I think it is some pill to keep him from falling back to sleep. It is green Trident. He turns me onto my back and starts kissing me on the mouth. I taste the mint and I taste the whiskey it hides. He kisses me all over my face and digs a hole in my ear with his tongue, which makes my throat hurt. He leaves a trail of sticky stuff wherever his mouth goes.

I don't know how to say this is unpleasant.

Does your family still live in Florida? I ask.

Yeah. It's a shithole down there.

I don't ask why. I just wonder why they left Canada in the first place.

'Cause they're dumb.

It occurs to me that he probably didn't like school very much. This is a hard concept for me to grasp because teachers were always my friends, I always enjoyed reading—I just liked learning a lot. Alex has tattoos all over his body and he plays in a heavy metal band and he doesn't have a phone because he never bothers to pay his bills, but I only begin to understand the difference between me and him because of his attitude toward school, toward family, toward home. All those things make me unhappy too, but for different reasons.

I thought for a while that he was a rich prep school refugee who just does heavy metal as some sort of act of rebellion. But lying here, I understand that he is what he is and that's it. He is not slumming. He is white trash. He hates life. Compared to most people I know, my cat is really cool. He has no choice but the one he has already made. It is the prep school career that was an aberration. Everything that has happened since he got thrown out makes perfect sense.

He is now on top of me. Kissing my face some more and nibbling on my hair, which is getting stuck together with green gum. I think, We can just kiss. There's nothing wrong with this.

Then his hands move underneath my skirt. I have no underwear on. He massages the most inner part of my inner thighs and I say, Alex we shouldn't be doing this.

I know, he says. That's why we're going to.

Alex, I say. Today my editor just asked me if I've been fucking around with Don Henley and Steve Tyler from Aerosmith, because he heard some rumors about that from someone at
The New York
Times
. Funny thing is, they aren't true. I've never even met either of them.

Oh, he says.

But this is true, I continue. And this is bad for my professional decorum.

Decorum
's the wrong word, he says.

My professional standards then—you know what I mean, I say.

Standards
is a better word, he says.

Alex, I ask, giving up on the last conversation. Alex, how come you never hit on me before? I didn't even think you found me attractive.

The time wasn't right, he explains. You can't analyze these things. His hands move under my shirt and under my bra. He rubs my chest and his thumbs make circles around my nipples. I say, I'm probably the only woman in New York who wears a bra and doesn't wear underwear.

That's okay. I like bras.

I decide to stick my hand under his shirt, to seem like I'm participating. He pushes my hands down his stomach and pulls my fingers below the drawstring and into his pants and the flesh I touch there is so hard and so long and so large, it surprises me a little. I usually think that tough guys are trying to compensate for what they lack between their legs. But no.

I hold it tight at first, because it's all I can do, and then I run my fingers along the ridges, curious, interested. I worry that I'm not doing anything to make him feel good. Then I realize, he's not doing anything to make me feel good either. But I feel obligated to act like I'm enjoying myself.

I moan. I wonder when this will stop. Usually, with most guys, maybe on the first date, you neck until someone says that maybe we should stop. Just because you've kissed somebody doesn't mean you're going to fuck them, and certainly not the first time you're together.

But I understand that with Alex I don't stand a chance. I crossed an invisible line as soon as I walked through the door. If I stay, I have to do it. My other option is to leave. And I don't want to leave.

I am seeing the band in concert for the first time after hearing an advance tape of their new album, which I like a lot. Alex is wearing a white, rather sheer blouse and tattered jeans. The shirt hangs loosely around his hips. He has dark spectacles on. He doesn't sing; he growls. He reminds me of Jim Morrison.

A friend of his is in the audience. Alex introduces him and pulls him on the stage. Big Joe here is going to be a big star, he promises. Come on, Joe, show us your rock star collagen smile.

I think it is clever of Alex to modify “smile” with “collagen.” He must be pretty bright, I think.

Next, he reaches out to the audience and does a high five with a tall blond guy with dreadlocks and a red bandanna who looks a little like Alex. He is actually better-looking than Alex, his features sharp, his skin smooth and clear. Alex minus the damage.

This is my little brother, he says as he pulls the lanky blond boy toward the stage. My fucking little brother. I guess he's not so little, he's got at least four inches on me. Height-wise, that is. I don't know about his pecker. Is there anyone here who's done a comparison?

Backstage after the show, Alex is sitting and drinking beer with some skinny frail-looking blond woman-child at his side. At various intervals, she gets up and crosses the room to retrieve him more bottles of Bud. She is pretty, even natural-looking, surprising because most groupies aren't.

I bend over to talk to him. Can I catch you later? he asks. I kind of want to chill out after the concert.

I feel like an invasion. I realize that I am one. I am a journalist. I am not a groupie. I suddenly wish I could give up my job, except then I realize that I would never have met Alex if it hadn't been for my job. Besides, Kent is waiting outside. I should go.

Alex says, Look, I'll call you next week.

Will you really? I want to know.

I promise.

His hands are now under my skirt again. He touches me, fingers me over and over again, and I realize I am so wet. There is no way to explain how this happened. His idea of foreplay is taking his clothes off. And actually, neither one of us has any of our clothing off. He has hardly done anything to merit any sort of reaction from me besides a voice in my head that is saying, Don't do this. But my body is acting on its own and I am wondering what is it inside me, where is this mysterious place, this crazy hidden female thing that wants him so badly that I am wet without his doing anything. My body is begging for it.

At least it won't hurt.

My skirt is straight and tight. He pushes it inside-out up around my hips. He presses my thighs to the bed and I remember what all those years of ballet were for. He pulls the drawstring open and the sweats slip down on his hips and I almost gasp at the sight of him. There is so much there. I think men worry about size a lot more than women do, especially since its variations have very little to do with the amount of actual physical pleasure I've experienced. But the more there is, the more confidence the man has, so it ends up being a turn-on anyway.